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Speed reading, an interview & mountain views

2/20/2018

Hello.

John F Kennedy learned to speed read, and Jimmy Carter - with his daughter Amy - took a course on speed reading while still US president.

Given what I do (reading lots of books and writing about them for a living), quite a few people have asked for tips on speed reading, and techniques for memorization.

I don't do speed reading, almost the opposite. When picking up a book that I have expressly chosen to read, I want to give the author due regard by taking the first few chapters slowly, really taking in everything they say. This may mean reading the same line or paragraph several times. Only after I feel that I have got the message of the book, might I start to speed up with the rest of the text, since later chapters generally fill out the idea of the first ones with examples and illustrations. (This is non-fiction I'm talking about; with fiction, every page can be a delight so the only speed reading you will be doing is if it's a book you can't put down). So if anything, I 'slow' read, giving the author due regard, until a faster pace is justified.

One other thing I do in lieu of speed reading is 'sizing a book up'. By that I mean taking it in hand, flicking through it, opening at random pages, reading the obscure bits like the acknowledgements and notes. I might just keep a book on my desk or have it by my bedside without reading it, just to be reminded of the author or their message. If their covers are facing up, books are always saying something to us, so be conscious of the books you have 'just lying around'. They encourage or reflect certain feelings, ideas and trains of thought, just as pictures on a wall or sculptures do.

As for memorization, the best way to remember anything is to takes notes, and to write down quotations you like. I can happily read and enjoy a book without taking notes, but I don't really feel like I 'own' the ideas until I've at least done some underlining of key sentences. If you've ever written a book or a film review, you will know that the act of reviewing means you treat the subject quite differently than if you were just consuming it for enjoyment's stake. In studying something, and putting down in words your response to it, you are giving the work a more indelible space in your mind.

Another way of recalling the essence or meaning of a book is to try to summarize it in one line, as I do with my 'In a nutshell' lines in the 50 Classics books. Can you really sum up Marx's Capital or Sun Tzu's The Art of War in one sentence? Maybe it's sacrilege, but better you remember one thing than nothing at all.

And remember, just one idea from one book could change your life - so read widely, and with care.

Interview

Citywire executive chair Lawrence Lever and director of content Richard Lander recently interviewed me to mark the serialization, in Wealth Manager magazine, of 50 Economics Classics.

Citywire, a financial information company in London, has serialized many of my books.

Among other things, the interview covers how I got into non-fiction writing, methods of selecting titles for each 50 Classics book, the future of work, and thoughts on reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus! Just click on the image above to watch the interview. Enjoy.

Book reviews

I mentioned reviews above. 50 Business Classics, which comes out in April, will include a chapter on The Everything Store, Brad Stone's excellent profile of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com.

The beta Amazon.com website, launched in March 1995, was primitive: mostly text and not very attractive, but had a shopping basket and a basic search engine. A key feature was reader reviews, which Bezos rightly thought could make the site different. Some publishing executives took the view, which seems quaint now, that negative book reviews on Amazon were doing the industry a disservice. However, Bezos knew that the company’s real value lay not simply in selling things, but in helping people to make objective buying decisions. Indeed, when I'm browsing books or some other product in an online store, I tend to trust readers/viewers/users more than I do paid critics.

Therefore, when anyone asks how they can support my work, apart from buying my books (in paperback, Kindle, or audio) the best thing you can do is post a review online, even if it's only brief. It's great when you tell me you have bought a 50 Classics book for friends or a loved one, but if you write a review, many more people can learn about the series and be affected in a positive way. So if you have a minute, tell other people what they can expect from my books, and what you liked about them! Here are some links:

Tom's page on Amazon
on Amazon UK
on Amazon Canada
on Amazon India

Mountain man

Recently I re-watched the film Seven Years in Tibet (1997), with Brad Pitt cast as German adventurer Heinrich Harrer. Harrer escaped from a British prison camp in World War Two and made his way across the Himalayas to Lhasa. He ended up staying for seven years, and was the confidant and teacher of the Dalai Lama. Had heard Harrer's book was good, but wasn't prepared for just how good. Each night before sleep I read a few pages and learn what Tibet was like when it was an isolated kingdom and with the Dalai Lama reigning in the splendid Potala Palace, which from 1653 to 1889 was the world's tallest occupied building.

In 2002, the year he turned 90, Harrer gave a talk at London's Royal Geographical Society recalling his extraordinary life, including his landmark ascent of the north face of the Eiger. "Mountains are alive," he said, "they have their rhythm and need rest... Mountains give us strength and provide a refuge. They are the realms of freedom."

As someone who is inspired just at the sight of a mountain, let alone climbing one, I am with Harrer. Any time we spend in nature is invigorating; getting lost amid trees or hills or sand makes us forget the trivial. It keeps the mind sharp and gives us back our joy and gumption, which sometimes the working week can take out of us. Hours and days spent looking at black symbols on a screen, or sitting at meeting tables, are not what our bodies were designed for. So this weekend, get out into nature and get back your self.

Kind regards,
Tom Butler-Bowdon

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On Gutenberg, the Diamond Sutra & Penguin

1/10/2018

Hello. A friend recently spotted this man making his way through 50 Economics Classics on the London Underground.

Something about the pose reminded me of a painting at the National Gallery in London, 'A Man Reading' (below). Attributed to the workshop of Rogier Van Der Weyden, it was painted around 1450 and is thought to depict the Frenchman Saint Ivo (1203-53), the patron saint of Brittany, lawyers, and abandoned children. What Ivo is reading is not clear, but it is clearly a handwritten document - which got me thinking about when printing was invented.

It turns out that the painting was done at exactly the same time Johannes Gutenberg was building the first modern printing press in Mainz, Germany.

Gutenberg trialled his press with a few Latin grammar books, but his first commercial printing, in 1455, was his famous Bibles. He sold them for 30 florins each, the equivalent of three years wages for a laborer, but still much cheaper than a Bible written out and illuminated by hand.

The 48 Gutenberg Bibles still in existence lack page numbers, indentation and paragraphing, but were the start of the modern book. Extreme measures are taken to protect them. A friend told me of a museum worker he knew who had to take an early Gutenberg book from England to another museum in Europe. The briefcase which contained it was handcuffed to the man. He would not be able to let it go without losing an arm, or his life.

Within a few years of Gutenberg's invention the cost of books would plummet, helping to foment revolutions (not least Luther's Reformation, with its mass pamphleteering) and massively increasing literacy and knowledge for the average person. People could read the Bible, and many other works, in their homes.

This picture, 'Old Woman Reading', by Gerrit Dou, was painted around 1631. The woman, reading the gospel of St Luke, is judging by her clothing quite well-off, but not of the super rich who were once the only people who could afford to buy their own books.

Raiders of the lost sutras

Gutenberg's bibles were, however, far from being the first printed book. At the turn of the twentieth century, Wang Yuanlu, a Taoist monk, made an astonishing discovery. At Dunhuang, on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, he found the entrance to a cave that had been walled up for 900 years. The famous 'library cave' contained thousands of Buddhist manuscripts, paintings, silk hangings, embroideries and Buddha statues, but also Hebrew, Nestorian, Daoist and Confucian texts.

When the British-Hungarian archeologist Sir Aurel Stein journeyed to the Mogao Caves in Northwestern China in 1907, this is what he saw:

Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet. The area left clear within the room was just sufficient for two people to stand in.

Ruins of Desert Cathay: Vol. II

Stein, something of a real-life Indiana Jones, bribed or persuaded Wang Yuanlu to give him some of the texts, including the Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest printed book (actually, a scroll five metres long, now in the British Library).

The Diamond Sutra conveys a long conversation between the Buddha and a disciple, Subhuti, on the nature of reality, including the teaching that what seems so solid and permanent to us is an illusion. Buddha tells Subhuti:

This fleeting world is like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

The Sutra had been translated from the original Sanskrit around 400, so the text marked several centuries of Buddhism in China, which had spread along the Silk Road from India.

The last lines of the Sutra's text state:
Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents, 11 May 868.
In Buddhism, one gains merit by disseminating Buddha's teachings, so the words "for universal free distribution" are carefully chosen. Printing meant that many more copies could be made.

Another revolution

I'm interested in anything that has led to the democratization of knowledge, so it was a pleasure to read recently Stuart Kells' Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.

They are so much a part of modern life that it is easy to take them for granted. Yet starting in the 1930s, Penguin's cheap but attractive paperbacks revolutionized publishing by bringing high-grade fiction and non-fiction to the masses - a “poor man’s university”. As a brand, Penguin became so hot that its 1961 share offering was oversubscribed by 15,000 percent. The public face of the company, Allen Lane, was feted a bit like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is today.

Penguin paperbacks ushered in one of those rare revolutions in which everyone wins: authors (because of big new audiences); publishers (bigger markets); and the public (greater literary enjoyment for a fraction of the price). Suddenly, people on low incomes could afford to buy books for the first time in their lives, instead of borrowing them from libraries. What Penguin stood for though, more than cheap books as such, was a general lifting up of the population. For this service, it remains a much-loved brand.

I will be including a chapter on the Penguin story in 50 Business Classics, which will be released in April 2018. There's a sneak peek of the cover!

You can preorder already here on Amazon or Amazon UK.

Bedside, fireside

This year I've tried to read more fiction, and these are some of the books I enjoyed.

Had never read James Joyce properly before, but Dubliners was a revelation. Written when he was in his twenties, it's a selection of darkly realistic stories of people in his native city - and yet, as with all Joyce's writing, totally universal in its themes.

Ian McEwan's Nutshell is a murder story written from the point of view of the murderess's unborn child. Brilliant idea - and gripping! Tobias Wolff's Old School is a beautifully written reminiscence, by a student, of life at an American boarding school. If you liked the film Dead Poets Society or JD Salinger's Fanny and Zooey, you will love it. Then there was Borges' Labrynths. Had to read each paragraph several times to understand what he was saying; it's basically philosophy in the guise of short stories.

My bedside/fireside reading at this moment is: a book on the teachings of Edgar Cayce, the seer-channeller of Virginia Beach; Heart Advice of a Mahamudra Master, by Gendun Rinpoche (this never leaves my bedside, I read it over and over); and In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanazaki, on the soulfulness of old Japanese houses and temples, where only the faint gleam of a gold wall hanging or the shine of black lacquer can be made out in the darkness.

As someone who prefers Stygian gloom and softly glowing light over brightness, I love this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when it gets dark around 4 o'clock and you have a long evening ahead of chatting, reading, watching a film or just thinking. After the hard work of the year I will be enjoying some festive celebrations with friends and family and retreating to my Winter cave.

Kind regards,
Tom Butler-Bowdon

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You must change your life

10/12/2017

The writing

Just finished writing another book - well, the first draft anyway. A rewarding and fascinating few months, and with a tight deadline it was pretty intense towards the end.

Now comes the editing, which involves: 1) the commissioning editor's initial judgement - fortunately, she liked what she read; 2) a copy editor marking up the document of 100,000+ words with highlighted mistakes and queries - see the example to your left from a chapter on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 50 Economics Classics; and 3) the manuscript going into 'proofs', which is the page layout you see when the book is published, and which gives me a final chance to make corrections.

These stages mean that by the time you read the book, I've read it through at least four times. A bit laborious, but it doesn't mean mistakes and typos don't get through - for example, we somehow left out the author bio page in 50 Economics, which is in every other title in the series, and in the original edition of 50 Spiritual Classics I confused GI Gurdjieff follower Kathryn Mansfield, a Kiwi poet, with the film star Jayne Mansfield! - but luckily advances in the printing industry means you can do quick reprints (with corrections) more often.

What have I just written? A couple of years ago I sent out a survey asking people what subject they would most like to see featured in the 50 Classics series. Top was philosophy, which was duly covered; second was business, so there's a hint of what's coming in 2018.

We can change, right

As well as books written on contract, I also have personal writing projects that are more long-term or speculative. As part of one of them, this week I've been devouring the German philosopher Peter Sloterdjik's You Must Change Your Life, which imagines human beings as a striving species that is continually working to better itself - either through spiritual, ascetic practices, or through secular physical training or personal development. The title comes from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, which has an observer taking in the headless stone torso of the Greek god in the Louvre museum. Struck by the power and athleticism of the figure, the observer suddenly sees his own, insufficient existence. The poem ends with the famous line, You must change your life.

This impulse for improvement or transformation is behind all my books. Writing the first three, 50 Self-Help Classics, 50 Success Classics, and 50 Spiritual Classics, I was often so taken by the great titles I was reading that I kept the book covers face down - such was their power.

These three books together celebrate what Sloterdjik calls Homo artista, or the "human in training". As a member of this striving, self-improving species, I wanted to find the best ideas from each of these realms, for myself as much as the reader.

Later this week is the release of a new edition of 50 Self-Help Classics, a new edition of 50 Success Classics, and the rerelease of 50 Spiritual Classics, all with lovely new covers and in Kindle e-book.

Help yourself

Almost 15 years have passed since 50 Self-Help Classics was published. What, if anything, has changed in the self-help field? Many would argue that the genre has been superseded by psychology and its more scientific approach to understanding why we think and act as we do. Indeed, when I wrote about Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism, such titles were a sign of things to come in terms of personal development becoming more grounded and scientific. A person who, 20 years ago, might have been happy to get a lift or a set of life pointers from How to Win Friends and Influence People, today might be drawn to a book by Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow).

There is still a place for great self-help writing, although it is more likely to support its claims by reference to research. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly are good examples. Yet self-help books can offer something that goes beyond psychology. David Brooks’ The Road to Character is really a work of ethical philosophy with a powerful message about personal change across a lifetime. Marie Kondo’s deceptively simple The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up aims to transform our life through changing our attitude to things and spaces; if our homes have the air of a Shinto shrine, peace, order and happiness reign.

What self-help books do well is combine aspects of different areas, including psychology, philosophy, spirituality, motivation and even business (see, for example, Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?) to create an intimate connection with the reader. You really can change your life, the authors tell us, and here's how.

The second edition of 50 Self-Help Classics includes new chapters on the above titles. The genre is as fascinating and inspiring as ever.

Success manual

The success genre continues to develop as well. One thing that has changed since the first edition is that strategies for success, which were once the preserve of folk wisdom, parents, bosses, and motivational speakers, have become the subject of mainstream academic research. Two great examples, which I include in this new edition, are psychologist Angela Duckworth’s investigation of the concept of ‘grit’, which tells us much about what makes people successful irrespective of intelligence, grades, or even life circumstances, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s research into the long-term benefits of being a ‘giver’ in the workplace, which contradicts the idea that success comes from selfish ambition.

I also wanted to go beyond tips, ideas and advice to cover theories of success. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success has been important in the way it goes beyond pat explanations of the ‘self-made’ person to offer a more well-rounded environmental, social view of how success happens. And yet, I believe that Gladwell goes too far in reducing the role of human agency and free will. The fact that life is not just about good opportunities, but having the guts or wisdom to seize them, despite the waves they can create, is really the essence of success.

Indeed, it is hard to go past the truth of Carl Jung’s thought:

“In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.”

My hope is that the combination of psychological science and success philosophy, combined with close observation of how people advance in real life, will result in a discipline of success (in the way that, for instance, management became a discipline). 50 Success Classics is one contribution toward that.

Enlightening read

The third in the personal development trilogy was 50 Spiritual. Getting into the minds of people like Teresa of Avila, Herman Hesse and Paramahansa Yogananda was an amazing thing, and while writing it I had some spiritual experiences myself. One would think you could only have such experiences while meditating or praying or being in nature - but no, it can come simply while reading a book.

This is not a new edition as such, just has a new cover, but if you feel ready for a book like this it is a good entry point. It spans the thinking of all the great religions, but also novelists including Somerset Maugham and New Age writers including Neale Donald Walsch, Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle.

Misbehaving

I included a chapter on Richard Thaler's Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, in 50 Economics Classics, along with commentaries on all the great names in the discipline, from Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty to Elinor Ostrom to Paul Krugman. As you've probably heard, Thaler has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for economics, or in this case behavioral economics, which blends insights from psychology with economic stuff to give us a more realistic picture of how people make decisions, and how economies work in the real world, not just in theory. According to orthodox economics, people are rational, and 'misbehave' when they don't act in their own best interests. But as Thaler's work notes, that is something we do all the time.

If you've seen the film The Big Short, about the 2007-09 financial crisis and how it happened (based on Michael Lewis' book, which I also cover), you will have seen Thaler himself in a cameo.

The scene is a casino, where he explains the "hot hand" fallacy. Good film, but the book The Big Short is even better.

In the stacks

What is the role of a library in a time when it is so easy to download just about any book?

In fact, as I've discovered, there are millions of titles which have not been scanned or are not available in e-book form. But beyond that, libraries are a place that people go to elevate themselves, either their mood or their mind, or both.

Yesterday I was in the The British Library, which was packed - not just the hundreds in reading rooms, but many more people sprawled around the lobby area and cafes using the free wifi and generally enjoying the atmosphere of learning. People know that libraries are not just a store of knowledge but a symbol of civilization, and they want to be part of that.

This week in the mail came an invite to a ceremony for the $1 million Berggruen Philosophy Prize at the New York Public Library. Sadly I cannot go, but I see there's a new film, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, by the esteemed documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. It won a prize at the Venice Film Festival this year, and has just been showing at the London Film Festival. Here's a review in the New York Times. Can't wait to see!

Kind regards,
Tom

p.s. I've written my first online course, "Great Modern Philosophers", which you can find on Highbrow. It's based on 50 Philosophy Classics and covers ten great minds in brief, including Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and more. Have a look!

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Tom Butler-Bowdon

Author of the '50 Classics' series covering key writings in personal development, philosophy and psychology.

50 Self-Help Classics
50 Success Classics
50 Spiritual Classics
50 Psychology Classics
50 Philosophy Classics

Butler-Bowdon.com

theory of success

Speed reading, an interview & mountain views

On Gutenberg, the Diamond Sutra & Penguin

You must change your life

Tom Butler-Bowdon

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